1 Reset them back to their original state. Perhaps it won’t clean slate them to their embryonic selves, but it’ll get a lot closer than summer camp.
2 Leave Your Planet. Kids are especially over-protected in the controlled spheres of our everyday lives. They need extra-planetary experiences with environments that provide the extremities of nature and culture
3 Un-tame Expressions. Art is increasingly becoming commodified and over-curated; it’s good to see art literally outside the gallery and gift shop walls.
4 Other Mores. There are certainly other customs and conventions that embody love, work, and life. This is the place to seek out values advocating humanity rather than blindly serving systems of economics, community, family and individual relationships.
5 Live Streaming and Sound System. Though much of the music is not my cup of tea or my kids, hearing music in the great wide open of the Playa creates landscape-sized sonic installations that are incomparable to any other audio setup. It’s also a perfect studio to make music (if you get to fringes, it’s like the largest anechoic chamber).
6 Playing with fire. The original technology bringing light, heat, energy, primal visual entertainment (light, shadow, silhouette, dance show). Burning Man’s nights are a constellation of fires that provide coordinates/orientation, gatherings, dance. Kids aren’t afraid of fire, that’s something adults learn, harness and control.
7 Physical not informational/data orientation. Get off Google Maps and back to spatial location and mapping based on landmarks, landscape, and the sun, the rest of the stars and our moon. Kids today lack their bearings in dimensional geography and printed maps while adults are quickly losing those senses.
8 Wheels. Here you get back to the sensation of your first time, first ride, the inertia and balance of you and the machine together as one apparatus, feeling the rush of ground flowing beneath your feet, the currents of dust and wind wrapping around your face and body. To have tens of thousands of bicycles traverse the Playa with you feels like we’re all solo occupancy starships crisscrossing the universe.
9 Immediate Interconnection. Because we aren’t being “co-present” through the web and connected devices, we begin to connect to our immediate space-time, the local presence of people, places and things (not the internet of).
10 Another Economy. Even a few days without buying for daily provisions and unnecessary, capitalist materialist clicks starts to reprogram a bit of our muscle memory to shop (therefore I am). Young kids know better how to share, barter, and trade before money come into play.
11 Another School. Here kids can learn an entirely new lesson than that of the state, private or home curriculum; information, knowledge, and wisdom is inherent in the land, in the sky and in each other.
